


The Place of Men-Made-Stone

by crfaddis



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Anthropology, Battle, Battle with No Winner, Fanzine: Interphase, Gen, Hallucinations, History, Interdimensional Travel, Solitude, Time Travel, Time warp, Visions, Zinedom Archive Project, away mission, fanzine fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1976-08-01
Updated: 1976-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 23:21:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15520956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crfaddis/pseuds/crfaddis
Summary: Spock agrees to attend a survey team as a way of obtaining some rest or relaxation in a Vulcan-like world. Instead, he experiences a vision of the planet’s past.





	The Place of Men-Made-Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally published in August 1976 in the fanzine [Interphase 3](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Interphase_\(Star_Trek:_TOS_zine\)#Issue_3) and was reprinted in 1978 in [Computer Playback 2](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Computer_Playback#Issue_2). It, along with the art, has been posted here at the request of the original creator. You can read more about the history of the fanzine on [Fanlore.](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Interphase_\(Star_Trek:_TOS_zine\))

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156119161@N07/27616913538/in/album-72157667850778098/)  


"Spock-Om," the eldest Mohud said from the depths of her modesty-hood, "you alone of your tribe have not accepted the truths of the World. It is seen that your interest is genuine, but your soul does not open, you are a dune-briar that will not blossom. Not blossoming, you will never taste the fruit."

Spock sat back onto his pillow and shook invasive grains of sand out of his heavy indigo robes. He was beginning to regret coming along with the anthropological research team, regardless of how interesting the Ummirs were, or how much this planet resembled Vulcan. He was not an anthropologist, he did not fit in with the Humans on the team, and his presence was becoming more of an impediment than an assistance.

"Mohud-Om, it is known to you that we have come from beyond the Dark Cliffs, from the lands across the shifting sands. I have come from a place beyond even that, and there, I was taught to judge the World with my senses, not with my… visions."

"Yes, you said that," the elder said patiently. “It is the teaching you called Logic. It is a good teaching, and we Ummir respect its powers. Yet you crossed The Places That Take Men's Lives to seek us, and one does not seek beyond his own place unless the wisdom it holds is no longer enough. You have opened your hood, yet you hesitate to look out of it. Why do you fear what can not harm you, but will enrich you?"

"I cannot answer you, Mohud-Om. Perhaps the wisdom you offer, the 'vision' that I cannot perceive with my senses, is not the wisdom that I am seeking."

"It is known, too," Lieutenant Haas added, trying to cover for the Vulcan, "that it is difficult to bring a new spouse into an old family. Is that not also one of your truths? Perhaps Spock-Om must search his soul for room for a new spouse before he can decide if he wants her."

"The truth applies, Haas-am," the Mohud said. She leaned toward Spock from across the fire, and the deep crinkled lines of her face, glowing in the orange light, reminded him of T'Pau, his great-grandmother. Yet more than light years separated those two matriarchs—the Ummir had that odd, indigo-painted magic eye on her forehead that made her seem like some witch, or a female Polyphemus, for her own eyes were mere slits.

"Spock-Om," she was saying, "the desert holds wisdom as it holds water: it is always there if you know how to seek it."

Haas was flashing him looks that pleaded for Spock to drop out of the conversation.

"Perhaps, then, Mohud-Om, I shall contemplate the desert for a time and listen for its voice," Spock said, and pressing his palms to his forehead in ritual salute, he ducked out of the tent before he upset Haas' data-collection completely.

Under the starry night, he lifted his head to breathe in the warm, dry breeze that swept up out of the broad, dune-skirted valley below. Fragrance from the cooking fires tinged the breeze, and the laughs and clamor of the camp rose and fell on its wafts. The Ummir, like the pre-Reform Vulcans, lived their lives by night, and slept through the merciless desert days. And here, as on Vulcan, there was a ruby tinge to the night sky despite the lack of clouds.

Voices rose from the tent behind him, and Spock knew that Lt. Haas had managed to turn the conversation back to a more positive direction. There was a skill to deriving cultural information from informal conversation, and Spock knew he himself did not have it. He strolled away from the raucous laughs, and headed toward the edge of the mesa, to where a long slope of centuries-old dune led all the way down into the valley that the Ummir called The Place of Men-Made-¬Stone. At the rim, the sharp wind was dropping stinging bits of sand that it had picked up from the valley floor, and half to escape the wind and half to escape the boisterous noise of the camp, Spock started down the dune.

The slope was wind-packed but uneven, and he sank in places up to his knees, filling his boot-tops with warm sand. In other places it was as though the dune had been fused and paved like concrete. Part of the way down the slope, the wind stopped buffeting his ears, and the utter hush of the valley seeped into his consciousness and soothed him. It was truly much like Vulcan here. This life-teeming region, with its poverty grasses, dune-briars, sand-clutchers, even its fleet skipper-mice, reminded him keenly of the polar parklands where his family's shrines were, where he had spent several boyhood summers under the tutelage of his grandfather, Suvil.

He came to another patch of firm sand, and spreading his flowing skirts under him, he sat down, stretched his legs in front of him, and drank in the peace.

Vulcans did not take vacations, he had once told Jim Kirk; when they needed a rest, they entered a trance and truly rested. But Spock knew, too, that some part of his inner dynamics did not always find a trance-rest sufficient to his needs. The places at which the Human-dominated starship usually stopped to give the crew shore leave were not places that appealed to him, either. When Jim had suggested, then, that Spock might take advantage of this Vulcan-like world and accompany the survey team, he had immediately accepted the offer, much to Kirk's amazement, and unfortunately, to Dr. McCoy's amusement.

Scanning the stars for several moments, Spock looked for a pinpoint of drifting light that would wink out past the zenith when it passed into the planet's shadow, but the _Enterprise_ was either in the shadow already, or had changed its orbit so as not to be visible from the site of the planet survey at all.

With even the sky empty, he was totally alone, away at last from the continual, sometimes oppressive company of other minds, other voices, and he lay back in the sand, not minding that the particles would cling to his hair and skin, for nothing was so clean as a desert. He took long, satisfying breaths, and gazed up at the stars, and for once, did not even mind that his friends were not here to share this. He savored this solitude that was not loneliness.

After a while, he shifted so that he could study the valley. It was a very broad canyon, in actuality. On three sides, it was bounded by mesas, which were intercut by narrow box canyons carved out over eons of erosion. Dunes lapped up the steep sides of the cliffs, and in places, like here, the sand made ramps to the mesa tops. The other side of the valley, opposite from where he lay, was open to vast expanses of shifting dunes, an ocean of sand with brushflat islands. But the dominant feature of the landscape was a black pinnacle of rock, an incongruous butte that rose from the central part of the valley and towered over the mesas. Its color and structure were anomalous to the surrounding geognostic features. The only explanation of it could be that it was volcanic in origin, an igneous intrusion which had remained, being harder than its surrounding strata, when the rest had eroded away. Smaller chunks of the black rock surrounded it, and in the sand at his elbow, Spock noticed tiny black particles scattered just behind the crest of every ripple in the dune.

Gleaming in the dim starlight, the monolith was more awesome and fascinating than it had been during the brilliance of day. The Ummir had spent a portion of the previous evening in the valley picking _jumma_ berries, so Spock knew there was no particular taboo on the place, though the Ummir had a reverence for it, and the Mohuds, the "learned ones," frequently pitched their tents on the mesa overlooking it. The monolith seemed to have a mystical meaning to the Mohuds, which they would not discuss. The Ummir, the Mohuds, the monolith, all intrigued Spock mightily. There was evidence that the Ummir had knowledge of sophisticated technologies, yet the tribes preferred to live primitive nomadic lives. He wondered what it was about the black rock that was of importance, and whether a close inspection of it would reveal some clues.

Curiosity aroused and out of control again, Spock stood and shook the sand from him, then strode purposefully into the canyon. At the bottom of the dune, in the trough between it and the next, lower dune, a wind had risen from somewhere, and a sand-devil was spinning in a tight spiral, whisking the sand as though it were indeed some invisible being twirling at the center of the tiny whirlwind. It hovered in the trough, spitting sand and dust, and Spock waited patiently for it to run its course or move on down the canyon, but it hovered and did not lose momentum. There was no easy way around it. Pulling his hood up and over his face, then, and hunching inside the long-sleeved Ummir cloak, he stepped into the trough. The particles stung him under the hood, and he squeezed his eyes shut tightly, nudged in contradicting directions by the gusts. Then, as suddenly, he was out of it. The wind was gone. He reached up to drop his hood, and was blinded by dazzling light.

"Come _on_!" a shrill voice begged him, and Spock blinked around at the mob of anxious beings pushing past him in the daylight. The beings were not Ummir. They were lizard-creatures, running upright like humanoids, clothed in gaudy ribbons and their own naturally beaded skins. Carrying bundles of belongings, they were fleeing from the open desert toward the butte.

The lizard pulled at him desperately.

"Hurry, Kivarni, they are coming!" it howled, then bolted away from him and ran with the hundreds of others. But Spock stood shotbolted to the ground and scanned the changed place in which he stood. He was across the valley from where he had been moments before. The mesas were tall, rolling hills, the dunes had gone to blossom under irrigating fan-sprays, and in the place of the black stone monolith stood a titanic rocket, obviously a primitive spacecraft.

"This is not possible," Spock said firmly. "It is an illusion. It can not be real."

He closed his eyes and concentrated, reaching for the image of the night-cloaked reality he remembered, but the cries of scurrying fugitives pierced his thoughts, and the hallucination would not dissolve. His mind raced back over details of his experiences with other illusions, with the Melkots, the Organians' humanoid deception, the tangible unrealities of the Talosians. In each case, he had been unable to confound the tenacious false sensory impressions, though he had been able to maintain a logical detachment from them. He must do so now. He knew that so long as he did not accept the illusion as reality, he could not be injured by it.

The cries rose to screams, and Spock turned to look back toward the open desert, where the straggling rear of the mob was shrieking. Still in the distance, what seemed to be a mounted troop of indigo-cloaked Ummir were riding toward the valley.

Catching one of the panicked lizards, he tried to determine what was happening.

"Why are you fleeing? Are you fearful of the Ummir?"

The being gave him a look that could only be frightened disbelief.

"Are you mad?" it hissed. "The ship is our only chance!"

It twisted out of Spock's grasp and scrambled toward the rocket, where the vanguard of lizards were jamming up a narrow rampway into the vessel. Already, belongings were being abandoned, along with beings too slow or weak to keep up.

The Ummir approached the entrance to the valley, all of them mounted on the powerful, llama-like _fendis_ , and they herded the straggling lizards into the valley, then closed the exit with a phalanx of their troops. There was tearing and clawing on the ramp to the rocket, now, and Spock found himself swept along in the current of bodies swarming towards that haven.

 _It was all most curious_ , Spock thought as he struggled to keep his footing. The lizard-beings were fleeing, not fighting, and the Ummir were tightening their ranks as they drove the mob inward, yet they appeared to be without weapons. The only casualties anywhere were those injured by their panicking comrades.

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156119161@N07/26617015317/in/album-72157667850778098/)  


The Ummir had effectively blockaded exit from the valley, and they sat their sweat-foamed _fendis_ silently and watched the mad exodus into the rocket. Spock realized that there were too many of the fugitives to possibly fit into the vessel, allowing for the proportion of its volume that would have to contain fuel, and he wondered if perhaps evacuation of the lizard-beings were all that the Ummir intended to accomplish. But then an amplified voice boomed out over the tumult, and it was a voice of judgment, such as Spock had heard the Mohuds use.

"Kivarni," it called, "you are done with our World. There was room and welcome for you when you brought your ships to it, but you did not honor your word. You took the sick greenness beyond your own places, you devoured our home the desert, you abused our liberty and enslaved our children. You shall not escape now to carry your lies to the stars and bring back armies to enslave us again. The Ummir will always be free. Forgive the violence you yourselves have driven us to take. We have taken up the Ancient Ways, and in this hour, they will be your destruction."

The shudder that swept through the throng raised involuntary gooseflesh on Spock's arms, and he barricaded his mental defenses against the menacing emotional overload that surrounded him.

Abruptly, the formerly mindless mob split up, a small collection of Kivarni pushing back through the crowds to form a defensive line at the rear, facing the Ummir. These Kivarni carried rifle-weapons, apparently projectile weapons. Without knowing how he had gotten there, Spock found himself part of that defensive guard, and like the others, he kept his eyes locked on the Ummir and marched backwards at a slow, grudging pace.

The snail-paced giving and taking of ground rolled back in silent determination, each side apparently wishing to avoid violence. Cries of terror still boiled from the ramps behind them, but the grim formation did not buckle. Face to face, a bare twenty meters between them, the Kivarni fell back as the Ummir advanced. The Ummir's cloaks flapped in the wind, giving them a menacing, voluminous aspect.

Then, a Kivarni almost next to Spock lost his composure, and brought his weapon to bear. Instantly several Ummir raised their empty hands, palms out, making the threatening lizard the focus of their gestures. There was no sound, no visible projection, but a blast of searing heat singed Spock's cheek, and a burst of expanding air shoved him into the Kivarni at his other side. Recovering himself, he raised both eyebrows at the boiling smoke that rose from an upright, crimson-glowing, lizard-sized lump of cooling stone. The stone was already cooling to black at the surface.

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156119161@N07/27616913098/in/album-72157667850778098/)  


The Ummir had not dropped their arms, and Spock peered at their still-open palms. The hands were empty of weapons, that was true, but there were wristlets of some violet-glazed ceramic or plastic, and on each palm, painted with a black pigment, was a drawing of an open eye, similar to the odd symbol he had seen on the forehead of the eldest Mohud.

"It is patently impossible for you to turn an organic being into stone," the Vulcan said aloud, but the Ummir kept advancing, and the Kivarni around him kept giving ground, as though he had not spoken at all. He was not aware, either, of moving himself voluntarily, yet he did not lose formation with the retreating lizards. With mild irritation, he went through the mental exercise intended to recapture reality, and once again, he was thwarted. The world of the Ummir stayed stubbornly green. The volcanic extrusion remained a rocket, and the pacifistic Ummir's intentions were unquestionably murderous.

The phalanx of Ummir parted and engulfed the cooling black column, which did not resemble its former structure except for its size. The Kivarni were being heavily pressed, now, and as the mob on the ramp continued to battle hopelessly, it was becoming obvious than none of the rear guard was going to be able to escape on the rocket.

"It is not necessary for you to resolve your differences in violence," Spock called out, raising his voice to carry over the din behind him. Though there was no indication that he was being heard or understood, he added, "it is possible that a resolution may be found to settle your differences peacefully. It is wasteful and illogical to proceed in this manner."

He could hear his own voice, but it was as though no one else could. And then, the mounting tension in the defenders burst its dam. A number of Kivarni broke ranks and ran for the rocket. Others dropped to their knees and fired their rifles. The Ummir were not invulnerable, for several of them pitched off their mounts, and the _fendis_ reared and bleated struck by the needle-shots. The controlled confrontation dissolved into chaos.

Ummir clustered in groups of four or five to concentrate their unreal powers, but whatever strange forces they were tapping, their control was tenuous, for Spock saw numbers of the Ummir suddenly vaporize in a blue flash, leaving blazing stumps of magma where they had stood. Around him, Kivarni shrieked and burned, for the Ummir had a grim calmness, even under the withering needle-fire, and most of them banded together, sweeping the meadow with scorching snakes of death.

The Kivarni ranks broke completely, and now the armed ones were turning their weapons on their own people to clear a path to the ramp. Already, the maw of the rocket was grinding closed, deserting several hundred fugitives in a cruel necessity to lift off and escape the wrath of the Ummir. The panic of those about to be abandoned mounted impossibly, and all sense of existence contracted to simple survival as bodies were shot, trampled, torn apart in a hopeless bid for escape. Spock found himself in the middle of it, unable to do anything but be shoved forward toward the sealing hatch.

A stinging pain to the side of his head sent him to his knees, and straining legs crushed him helplessly into the grass. Stunned, he lay quietly, eyes open and gazing into the weeds, where minute colonial insects were scurrying by his nose, mindlessly re-aligning the trampled soil at the opening of their nest. It would not occur to them, Spock thought dizzily, that the exhaust from the rocket boosters would shortly make a molten lake of this field, and all their efforts would come to naught.

Full awareness poured back with a shock, and Spock realized that he, too, would be killed in the lift-off. No, not true: this was an hallucination. He wrenched himself to his knees and immediately fell back. He touched at his head, where the pain was throbbing, and drew back a hand slicked with blood. Unbidden, his stomach tightened. He should not be bleeding in an illusion. He knew he had not invested full belief in the "world," did not accept it as reality, yet he was hurt. It was a paradox, and he found himself at a loss as how to resolve it.

Instinct resolved it out of necessity: he managed to get up enough to crawl. He was less than fifty meters from a cooling blackened sculpture than had formerly been a cluster of unfortunate Ummir. It would likely not provide sufficient protection from the main engines to save his life, but there was a dearth of alternatives. He pulled himself across the grass, vaguely aware that some Kivarni still scurried hopelessly around the scorched meadow, that the Ummir were casually picking them off one by one with their impossible weaponry.

He managed, then, to get up on one knee, then half-up on his feet, and he stumbled toward the dubious shelter. A deafening roar was building behind him, and a gust of hot wind shoved him along as he hobbled dizzily. The fore-burners of the great rocket were painting the cliffs in front of him an unnatural, reflected orange, and he threw himself, near fainting, behind the hardening rock.

But the rocket did not lift off. It was overloaded, and its fore-burners were digging out a lava lake under the engines. It would take the full force of all the engines to achieve lift-off, and that, Spock knew, would leave none of them outside alive.

The Ummir, though, had not turned to flee, as logically, they should have done. The entire group had banded together in one great curved line of outstretched palms, a string of glaring, black-painted eyes, and they focused in unison on the trembling colossus before them. The ground heaved, the air crackled, the growl of burning fuel consumed all thought. Then, there was a brilliance as of a bursting star, a wail of sound that threw creation upside down and inside out, and for eternal seconds, delirium throttled land and sky.

As suddenly, there was awesome silence.

It seemed hours of subjective time before the Vulcan found that he could move again, that he was indeed alive. He felt bruised inside and out, and his skull slammed with pain that made it difficult to think. He could do nothing in that state, and he gave precious moments to damping the pain down to the nuisance level, where reason was possible. He pushed up, then, and noticed that all about him the meadow was blackened or burning, except for places like his, which had been in the "shadow" of one of the lumps of rock.

He glanced over to where the rocket had taken off.

There was no rocket. Nor had it taken off. In its place, as he had half-expected, was a red-glowing pinnacle of black-crusting stone, dripping streams of incandescent magma from fissures in the cooling surface. As far as he could see in every direction within the valley, the ground was littered with lumps of stone that had been beings. The lake of lava in which the monolith sat was like a gaping wound that lapped with iron-based blood.

Spock experienced a wave of overwhelming exhaustion, an inner weariness that was more than physical. They were all dead. No sign of Ummir or Kivarni remained. As always, violence had left no winner.

For himself, he had nowhere to go. Some time warp, or worse, perhaps a dimensional interphase, had thrown him into a reality in which he did not belong, and in which he could not function. He could not be certain that he was even sane. He drew his knees to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs, too worn to move, and glanced up at the darkening ruby sky to glimpse the first twinkling stars. It was a sky without meaning for him, for it contained no _Enterprise_. He could not be sure that it even contained a planet Vulcan.

Footsteps crunched behind him, and he stiffened. Ummir? They would kill him, as they had killed the earlier survivors.

He spun and found himself looking into a creased, hood-shaded face. The form loomed over him, and he braced himself for death as the palm reached out.

"Jim!" the voice cried. "Jim, over here!"

 _McCoy_?

Spock felt hands under him, heard garbled excited voices, recognized the whirr of McCoy's diagnostic instrument. Someone touched a canteen to his mouth, and he drank deeply, not realizing how thirsty he had been. He drank too fast, though he knew better, and it made him cough painfully. He throat felt stripped. His lips were cracked.

"Where have you been?"

"We've been hunting for you for days!"

"You can thank that thick Vulcan hide of yours that you're not completely dehydrated."

"Even the sensors couldn't find you."

"Where in hell have you been?"

With some effort, Spock managed to focus his eyes, and McCoy's face had been replaced with Jim Kirk's. The Captain, like McCoy, was dressed in the Ummir robes, which, of course, he would have to be, as per regulations.

"More water?" Kirk offered.

"No," Spock said hoarsely. He pushed up, and Kirk and McCoy helped him to sit, Kirk supporting him. Spock raised one weak arm and brushed at his dust-rimmed eyes, then looked around at his surroundings incredulously. It was the valley again, as he had seen it before—before whatever had happened, had happened. It was near dusk, yes, but the hills had become cliffs again, the meadows were dunes. The great black butte loomed near, but it was sand-scoured and age-worn, half tumbled down from what it had—in that other place—once been. Just behind him, a low, crumbling black boulder, pitted and shapeless, threw an amorphous shadow over him.

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/156119161@N07/26617015027/in/album-72157667850778098/)  


"Spock, what happened to you?" Kirk asked. He helped Spock to sit straighter while McCoy poked at a gash across the Vulcan's scalp. "Nobody could find you, not the ship's sensors, not us, and not the Ummir. We must have scanned this spot twenty times in the past two days, and you weren't here before. Do you remember anything?"

The Ummir Mohuds were just reigning in their _fendis_ from a hard ride down from camp, and the elder with which Spock had conversed strode across the sand to kneel beside the Vulcan worriedly.

"Spock-Om, we had fears that the desert had claimed you. MacCoy-Om, can your healing give him aid?"

"He jus' got a nasty crack on the head, Mohud-Om," McCoy said. "He'll be fine in no time. Spock-Om has a thick skull."

"Spock," Kirk prodded, "do you remember where you've been?"

Spock found his gaze captured by the Mohud. Her seamed face, as innocent. This was another Ummir of another time, of another place.

"I do not know where I have been. I am not certain that where I was is in this time, or indeed, in this universe. In the place where I was, the volcanic butte was a rocket-powered spacecraft. The dunes were green with grass. There were a people called Kivarni, who were invaders, and they were turned to stone, along with their vessel, by the Ummir. It is not logical, it has no relation to our own reality, yet I believe that.it was an actual event to which I was a witness."

He glanced up at McCoy, suddenly, and added, "Doctor McCoy, have I suffered an injury which could have caused these illusions, or have I lost my sanity?"

"I'd say 'no' to the latter, and 'I don't think so' to the former. Your head wound is superficial. It could have been caused by heat-stroke, but you seem lucid enough now."

Kirk's grip on Spock's shoulder tightened. "Whatever happened, I'm glad we found you again. We'll go on up to the tents now to let you rest, and we'll start for home later," Kirk said carefully. "The Ummir have helped us to gain new wisdom, but we have other lands to visit."

Spock got onto his feet while one of the Ummir led a _fendi_ over for him to mount. He let the others hoist him up into the saddle, and the Ummir held the animal while Kirk mounted behind him and threw an arm around the Vulcan's waist to steady him. They were ready to head up the long, switchbacked trail to the campsite, when the eldest Mohud noticed Spock taking one last, incredulous look around the valley.

"There are more truths to the World and to the many Suns than we can know, Spock-Om," she said.

"Possibly, Mohud-Om. The 'Men-Made-Stone', did they find truths?"

The Mohud only smiled, her face more crinkled than before. The painted eye on her forehead almost seemed to wink. Then she mounted her _fendi_ , and they rode in silence out of the canyon.

THE END


End file.
